Spotify – we see your crazy music genres and we raise you Flixpop, Trumpstep and Trollwave

Fidgetstyle, stomp and holler, discofox and skweee - confused at the bizarre music genres popping up on your Spotify playlists of 2017? NME's king of genre-inventing answers back

Big black sludge fan, are we? Heavily into your deep discofox, we see. Major consumer of vegan straight edge, fidgetstyle or skweee? As our Facebook feeds fill with people proudly posting their Spotify stats for 2017, listing their most played songs, artists and genres (we get it, you like music), it’s been most enlightening to find out which of the streaming service’s 1,400 obscure genre categories your nearest and dearest most favour. If they’ve been hammering the Mumford and Lumineers streams all year, they rank highly as fans of ‘stomp and holler’. Rack up hefty playtime with Californian robot-ravers Klaypex and they’ll be classed as key members of the catstep scene.

Now, as the undisputed world champions of making up nonsensical genres – this very writer, for instance, was even behind a short-lived early-noughties scene bafflingly entitled No Name – we at NME see this as a challenge. If Spotify have taken the gloves off, we’re happy to go to a bareknuckle blues gig with them. Here are the genres we feel should be added to their bewildering array…

Trumpstep

A really great genre, the best in the world. Huge. Built around beats made from gunshots, bricklaying and golf strokes, Trumpstep has often been criticised for sounding incoherent, paranoid and ineffectual, but has gained fans nonetheless. Many tracks in the genre, such as ‘The Lawyer Said It’ by Fake News and Bigly’s controversial ‘Grabbed ‘Em By The Pussy (Still Not Impeached)’ – build from the sound of frenzied tapping on an iPhone at 3am to climaxes uncannily resembling nuclear conflagration.

Tindo

With the revolution in mobile dating apps, emos have a million more outlets for rejection and alienation. Hence the rise of tindo and its sub-genre sadswipe, a scene in which having zero matches is a badge of honour and anguished punk songs such as ‘I’m Never Right (Swiped)’ by Roadkill Profile Pic always end with Siri answering the question “why am I unworthy of love?”

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Flixpop

Released in 28-hour batches, Flixpop albums stretch one simple melody out over numerous lengthy, often tedious tracks, but compel you to keep listening by putting the chorus at the very end, then starting the next track before the previous one has finished and bridging them with the words “Alexa, order pizza”. You’ll have heard your friends raving about Flixpop acts such as No Spoilers, Binge Yourself Blind, Stranger Thrones, Life Back Please and Didn’t We Used To Have Sex?.

Post-coital lambert

Basically just Cigarettes After Sex.

Shatner’s bassoon

Named after the part of the brain that controls time perception, Shatner’s bassoon is a kind of disturbing chill-drone in which one second of an over-acted soliloquy is electronically stretched out to last a whole month. Only enjoyable on a hefty dose of clarkycat with a spunky backpack chaser.

Dickpic

The dickpic genre encompasses any music you don’t actually want to listen to, but are unexpectedly forced to. YouTube album ads, shit Spotify playlist suggestions, Ed Sheeran’s ‘The Shape Of You’ in pubs, U2’s ‘Songs Of Innocence’ album, that sort of thing. Against our will, then, we are all unwilling dickpic ‘fans’.

Trollwave

Also known as Hopkinstronica, trollwave has exploded since the Brexit vote, a gentle background grumble of sound occasionally interrupted by a vocalist shrieking something morally objectionable about refugees. Championed by LBC Radio, the genre has come into its own over the past 18 months, and some established acts are jumping on the bandwagon. Take Morrissey who, it recently appears, has always had a trollwave element to his music.